We're running short on quick tips! That means we need your expertise! For tonight's evening tip, I'll simply refer you to the "2 Minute Video Tip" that I created on my personal site, Detached Designs, this morning.

One of the easiest ways to control the transparency of elements in After Effects is to make use of a matte; however, mattes come in various flavors—track mattes, garbage mattes, layer blend modes, and alpha and luma mattes, among others...

This is a Video Tutorial / VTM on texturing a billboard which is riddled with bullet holes, adding wear & tear / weathering to the poster as well as generally using alpha, specular & normal maps to your advantage.

The tutorial covers using the background / reference image options in C4D including how to set up an alpha channel in Photoshop, projecting splines and building up polygons in an empty polygon object using the structure manager.